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***The FEBRUARY 2018 VUD is now available.***

DTV #100!

WJXT 42 from Jacksonville showed up last night and it brought a couple of friends!
WPXC 24 (Jacksonville's Ion affiliate licensed to Brunswick, GA) was in pretty good for about 20 minutes. It's my 100th digital station logged. There were no call letters in the PSIP of course, but I hoped some calls might flash on the screen at the top of the hour. Unfortunately -- now everyone on the forum say it with me -- "it faded out just before the top of the hour."

Around this time WJEB 44 just barely decoded, yielding another non-ID to the effect of "59-1 TBN". That became DTV #101. There is a picture on my phone but I can't post it now.

This is the second logging for WJXT
Distance for WPXC is 461km (286mi)
Distance for WJXT and WJEB is 400km (249mi)

"You Might Be a Redneck If...
Your TV is on 24/7.
Your TV has been permanently on for over a decade.
The only time your TV is off is during a power outage.
Your TV gets 512 channels, but you go outside to use the bathroom.
Your new TV is sitting on top of your old TV.
Your TV costs more than all of your other furniture.
Your deer-stand has a TV antenna on it.
Your cable provider has no idea that you exist."
Jeff Foxworthy

I've been playing around with DXing in different spots, and we all know that location rules. I'm putting up a tower in the spring, and I'm not so sure I want to waste money on a fancy UHF setup here since it's a money pit that won't yield anything good. I might just throw up a mediocre low-profile UHF antenna and call it a day. I enjoy DXing UHF DTV if I'd ever get it, but for me, I'm discovering other bands to be more productive. Heck, why bother trying to log 100-mile Pittsburgh DTVs when I can transmit to Europe and South America using a wire and 100 watts with my ham license? Sorry to be a downer. That's my perspective at this point. There's lots of fun in DXing though.

Yeah, Chris sinks much more time into this hobby and has been at it for more years and he's only 40 ahead of me. You guys have cities 100 and 200 etc miles in every direction, each with their clusters of stations. For better or worse, South Florida has the Bahamas (barely any OTA to speak of), Cuba (a different system no one has a STB for yet), and a whole 'lotta water. A 500-mile tropo opening to the middle of the Gulf of Mexico ain't worth anything if it doesn't go all the way to Texas or Mexico.

Yeah, Chris sinks much more time into this hobby and has been at it for more years and he's only 40 ahead of me. You guys have cities 100 and 200 etc miles in every direction, each with their clusters of stations. For better or worse, South Florida has the Bahamas (barely any OTA to speak of), Cuba (a different system no one has a STB for yet), and a whole 'lotta water. A 500-mile tropo opening to the middle of the Gulf of Mexico ain't worth anything if it doesn't go all the way to Texas or Mexico.

....which means, Ryan, at the rate you're going, you should surpass my total in a year or two.

Someday, someone will anchor a boat with outdoor antenna in the middle of the Gulf. That would be awesome, especially in March or April each year. (Is it in the middle of the Gulf where that guy in the Clear TV Key antenna ad has the boat? Bwahahaha)

That coastal tropo is serious stuff. I try logging high-VHF tropo with my crappy 4-bay UHF antenna here when I'm portable, and it just doesn't want to cut it. Yet I take the same antenna to Myrtle Beach and log all the high-VHFs from Tampa and Miami at near and over 500 miles!! I don't ever count on seeing tropo that strong here.

I'm sure this strong tropo translates to bright red/orange/yellow colors on the tropo forecast map. Although it seems the guys in the Midwest are capable of logging good stuff even in weaker colors like blue/purple. There's no noise out there in no-man's land. I apply a decent preamp here, and I'm just amplifying all the noise with it. If I started DXing all the sources of noise and interference, I'd have double the logs.

Some of the most intensive coastal tropo I've ever seen was when I dxed from York, Maine and from the Cape. A tuner with rabbit ears attached had such super strong signals I couldn't believe it. I've never seen anything like that here north of Hartford, even with an APS13. Over the past few years tropo has all but disappeared. It doesn't matter though because the band is so trashed (IBOC/xltrs) that it's mostly not worth looking for it.

Some of the most intensive coastal tropo I've ever seen was when I dxed from York, Maine and from the Cape. A tuner with rabbit ears attached had such super strong signals I couldn't believe it. I've never seen anything like that here north of Hartford, even with an APS13. Over the past few years tropo has all but disappeared. It doesn't matter though because the band is so trashed (IBOC/xltrs) that it's mostly not worth looking for it.

Mike... I totally agree with you. I don't see much point in spending time DXing DTV or FM when the band's trashed. What fun is the hobby if you need to have a specific type of location just to do the hobby? It's more likely I'll die before anything decent shows up here. I'm finding other aspects of the DXing hobby to be pulling me away... aspects that don't require a remote site in "Tropo Alley", and are far more successful at my current QTH. I've even thought of removing my UHF antenna stack and re-using the mount for a good transmission antenna. It would be far more productive. I talked to a ham in St. Lucia the other day, and he copied my signal beautifully. I'm using 100 watts and a crappy 60' wire I carelessly strung from the roof. You probably don't wanna know how much time and money I've invested in my current antennas for TV/FM DX that have delivered poor results.